Western politicians have failed to speak up about the slaughter of civilians in Sudan because the United Arab Emirates has bought and paid for their silence, according to a top Sudanese general.
Lieutenant General Yasser al-Atta, a member of Sudan’s governing Sovereignty Council and the military’s second in command, told journalists that UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed has launched a race war against the Sudanese people.
He accused the ruler of Abu Dhabi of supporting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which has been carrying out massacres and atrocities across Sudan over the past two and a half years of war, most recently in the Darfur city of el-Fasher.
Atta said the UAE-backed RSF, which has been fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) since April 2023, “launched a big war against the Sudanese people”.
“They entered people’s houses in Khartoum and other cities. They loot and destroy everything: hospitals, electricity, water supply, everything that keeps people alive,” he said.
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But Atta said the “world has been silent regarding all the RSF has done in Sudan” despite “social media and technological tools” which enabled the paramilitaries’ crimes to be seen and understood.
The reason, stated Atta, is that “this silence was bought by the power of the UAE’s money”.
UK role criticised
Speaking over dinner with Sudanese and foreign reporters in a restaurant near his Omdurman military headquarters, Atta singled out former colonial power Britain for special criticism.
“We were expecting the British people to be more aware. They were close to the Sudanese community as per the historical relationship. They know our heritage, our culture and our way of life,” he said.
But the general drily concluded that “every country reflects its own interests and that’s understood”.
‘As a result of the world not watching, mercenaries were imported to our country and the UAE were allowed to do it’
– Yasser al-Atta, Sudanese general
The United Arab Emirates is Britain’s largest trading partner in the Middle East with trade between the two hitting £24.3bn last year.
The Emiratis are also heavy investors in Britain, most famously through a majority stake in Manchester City football club.
Atta also criticised British media coverage, given Sudan’s “long years of relationship” with Britain.
He accused journalists of failing to report a war in which “we have lost 150,000 Sudanese souls”.
“As a result of the world not watching, mercenaries were imported to our country and the UAE were allowed to do it,” he said.
MEE has previously detailed how the UAE has transported Colombian mercenaries to the RSF through an air base in Somalia.
Atta said the paramilitaries have hired fighters from as far afield as Ukraine, too, as well as African countries such as Niger, Mali, Chad and South Sudan.
Before the war, there was ample evidence that the RSF had close ties with Russia’s Wagner Group.
According to Atta, the collapse of the Wagner Group following the death of its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin in an air crash two years ago has opened up new recruitment options for the RSF.
Most recently, he stated, the RSF has brought in recruits from Somaliland.
A history of violence
In recent weeks, greater global scrutiny has been placed on the RSF and the UAE’s backing of it after the paramilitaries stormed el-Fasher on 26 October and launched a killing spree.
But Atta was keen to stress that the RSF has committed numerous atrocities beyond the slaughter in el-Fasher, drawing attention to rampages in al-Jazira state south of Khartoum.
“There are many small villages in al-Jazira and in those villages hundreds were being killed,” he said.
An attack on al-Seriha village in October 2024 is reported to have killed around 100 people.
Sudanese in al-Tekeina, another village in al-Jazira, told MEE that the RSF killed more than 50 of its residents as they successfully fought off the paramilitaries.
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The RSF, Atta said, “are killing more and more people just to make sure they do not exist”.
He told MEE that the number of civilians massacred in el-Fasher has now risen to 32,000, with more killed every day “according to ethnicity and race”.
Last week, Darfur Governor Minnie Minnawi told MEE that the number had reached 27,000.
The Rapid Support Forces grew out of militias known as the Janjaweed that the Sudanese military and government under former president Omar al-Bashir used to fight rebel movements in Darfur 20 years ago.
Those rebels were rising up against the central government in protest at the marginalisation and discrimination of Black Sudanese. The mostly Arab Janjaweed targeted Black communities as they rampaged across Darfur in a conflict that has been described as the 21st century’s first genocide.
Janjaweed fighters, drawn principally from traditionally nomadic Arab tribesmen, also used the conflict as an opportunity to drive Sudanese – most often from Black African ethnicities – from their land.
More recently, the RSF has been accused of genocide by the United States and human rights groups once again, particularly over the mass killings of Sudanese from the Masalit community in West Darfur in 2023.
“If you are from a non-Arab or SAF-supporting tribe they will shoot you and kill you directly,” Atta said.
“Those people who try to escape, the RSF will follow them and kill them on the road.”
An Emirati ‘project’
At the start of the dinner, which was facilitated by the Al Arabiya production company, Atta, a veteran of four decades in the Sudanese army with a background in intelligence work, told journalists: “I am going to be very honest and direct. I am a straightforward person.”
Answering through a translator, he accused the Abu Dhabi ruler Mohammed bin Zayed of planning to drive African tribes out of Sudan.
He said that a source in Dubai warned him a year before the war started that Mohammed bin Zayed often referred to the RSF leader Mohammed Hamdan Daglo – popularly known as Hemedti – as the “prince of Sudan”.
Atta claimed that the UAE president had personally approved a strategic plan to rid Sudan of its African tribes.
He told journalists that the “project” entails a massive programme of relocation and ethnic cleansing, with northern Sudanese people and Nubian tribes pushed into Egypt.
The project, according to the general, also envisages the expulsion of southern Nuba tribes and others from South Kordofan and Blue Nile states to South Sudan.
Atta said that, according to Sudanese intelligence, the UAE has established a chain of command in Abu Dhabi to manage logistics, media and the supply of armaments to the RSF in Sudan.
Middle East Eye has asked the UAE embassy in London for comment.
Before the meeting with Atta, the Sudanese army took journalists to a military base that had become a graveyard of destroyed RSF armoured vehicles. Some, officers said, had been supplied by the UAE.
The military equipment, said Sudanese officers, was either flown in from Chad or Somalia or came overland through Libya.
These vehicles, they claimed, were often hidden inside mosques or public buildings to avoid destruction by the Sudanese air force.
Atta told reporters that one explanation for the Emirati intervention might be that “UAE wants gold, or land for agriculture or land for minerals”.
But he said Sudan has always been “open to investment”.
“No, we think what the UAE really wants is a race decision. The Sudan they see is an Arab land without non-Arabs,” he said.
“The RSF is just a tool in the hands of the Emirates,” he added, highlighting the many Emirati interventions in countries across the Middle East and North Africa.
“The United Arab Emirates is an enemy. They have damaged or destroyed the Arab world and the entire region we are living in. The UAE is behind the problems in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and other countries.”
‘The United Arab Emirates is an enemy. They have damaged or destroyed the Arab world and the entire region we are living in’
– Yasser al-Atta
Some of those countries, Atta said, were “exchanging information” with the Sudanese military about Emirati activities.
Since the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the UAE has sought to project its power across the region by bolstering friendly autocratic governments and combating champions of democracy and political Islam.
Much like in Sudan, it has also backed secessionists and militias in states like Libya, Somalia and Yemen, leading to huge upheaval and instability.
The Sudanese conflict erupted over plans to fold the RSF into the regular military, which would have significantly weakened Hemedti and the influence of the UAE.
Yet supporters of the RSF promote a narrative in which the paramilitaries are fighting an “Islamist” government dominated by Bashir-era religious conservatives.
This is a framing that Atta flatly rejects, saying before the war started “we agreed to create one united independence army of people without ideologies”.
“I was a member of the senior management committee that identified and purged 132 Islamist officers,” he said.
Those officers he said had been inherited from the Bashir era, which ended in 2019 when the longtime autocrat was deposed in a coup d’etat – led by SAF leader Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan and Hemedti – following a popular revolution.
Communists and Baathists, as well as other ideological elements, said Atta, were also retired in the purge.
These officers, Atta claimed, have since been approached by Hemedti and awarded contracts in the RSF.
In a rare light moment, the general mocked the narrative spread by RSF supporters that “Burhan is Muslim Brotherhood and Atta is a communist”.
“They tell the Turks we are communists and Qataris we are extremists. We don’t know who we are at the moment: communist or Brotherhood,” he joked.
A new basis for negotiations
Assessing the current military situation, Atta claimed that the number of RSF fighters had been reduced from 100,000 to 23,000 since the war began.
But, he warned, “they have the direct support of the UAE”.
Despite the Sudanese military being unable to lift a 550-day siege on el-Fasher before it fell to the RSF, he predicted the city would be retaken by the SAF within three months.
“We believe in peace. We are not warmongers. We want a solution based on justice and fairness,” he said – insisting, however, that “we will not accept any peace that will make room for the Emirates”.
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Significantly, he also ruled out any involvement in negotiations of US senior advisor for Arab and African affairs, Massad Boulos.
Boulous, who is also the father-in-law of Donald Trump’s daughter, led unsuccessful ceasefire negotiations in Washington in the days before el-Fasher fell.
The UAE was present as a member of the Quad, a group of states tasked with addressing the Sudanese conflict.
However, the SAF delegation refused to engage with the Emiratis as mediators, with sources telling MEE that UAE officials at the meeting would not allow the situation in el-Fasher to be addressed as the RSF closed in.
Laying down the basis for fresh negotiations, Atta demanded that RSF arms should be handed over and placed “into camps outside the main cities” with “safe roads” for humanitarian aid.
He also demanded that the UAE should send planes “to collect mercenaries and take them back to their countries immediately”.
He said that all those guilty of crimes against the Sudanese people should be brought to justice.
That list, he emphasised, must include members of the Sudanese armed forces accused of committing war crimes.
